EXCLUSIVE: One wants to be president, one will settle for knocking out David Haye...meet the Klitschko brothers

When the Klitschkos were mere 10-stone schoolkids standing well over five feet tall, Vitali used to see ‘my baby brother come home with a bloody nose and a black eye’ and threaten to go out and beat up the bullies.

‘Don’t worry,’ Wladimir would tell him. ‘You should see the state of those other boys.’

‘It was a familiar story in our house,’ says Vitali, the senior of the two siblings who kept growing until they became majority shareholders in the world heavyweight championship.

Got your back: Wladimir (right) and Vitali (left) Klitschko are best friends as well as brothers

‘I always wanted to protect my little Wladimir but it was never necessary. It will be the same story on Saturday night.’

Vitali does not expect to have to go looking for David Haye after Britain’s wearer of the other heavyweight alpha-belt exchanges massive blows with Wladimir in Hamburg’s football stadium.

‘In heavyweight boxing there is usually damage to both men and this is a tough fight,’ he says. ‘But if you ask me who is going to win then I ask you to examine which of them has all the physical and mental advantages. Mr Haye should be able to proceed happily with his retirement plans after shaking hands with my brother.’

That, of course, would be the handshake which Haye has kept avoiding during the acrimonious prelude to this title-unifying grudge match.

Family ties: Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko visit their parents Nadja and Vladimir in Kiev

Neither Klitschko is amused by either the T-shirt or the phone application which show them being decapitated by David’s Hayemaker of a right hand and Vitali has already had the Londoner by the throat during one chance meeting.

But now — as he shuttles between European premiers of Klitschko, the movie, en route to Wladimir’s corner in Hamburg — Vitali shrugs and says: ‘Haye is the heavyweight champion of the world only at talking. His mouth is unbeatable.

Strong bond: Vitaliy Klitschko (right) holding Wladimir

‘But only in the fantasy of his video game can he knock off all the heads he imagines. In the reality of the ring and in boxing skills he is not as good as my next opponent.’

Namely one Tomasz Adamek, the America-based Pole, in a September defence of his linear WBC title in Wroclaw.

The elder Klitschko will be 40 before then and he is taking that event to Eastern Europe for political as well as sporting and financial reasons.

While Haye is looking forward to an after-ring life in films and music, Vitali hopes to become president of Ukraine.

It was this ambition which lured him out of retirement three years ago to consolidate his ring celebrity and thereby propel his popularity into the polling booth.

Already an elected member of the city council in Kiev, to where his parents migrated from Kyrgyzstan when he and Wladimir were infants, Vitali became leader last year of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, a new party which has already won seats in government.

He views the challenge of dragging Ukraine into the 21st century as rather more stern than the one Haye presents to his brother, saying: ‘Geographically our country is European. But European without the culture, economics, the traditions, the history or the living standards.

‘My goal is to modernise Ukraine. It will not be easy but change can be the making of the country. We have to build European standards so that entry into the European Union becomes natural, automatic.’

Which one goes with my suit? David Haye (right) poses with Wladimir Klitschko

In concert with his brother, Vitali believes the route for this transition lies through education. This is a conviction born of a Spartan childhood through which teachers and coaches helped their parents urge them on to university and their masters degrees. Hence their ring pseudonyms Dr Iron Fist and Dr Steel Hammer.

Some of the most poignant images in the new film of their lives loop around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So scant was information about the effects of radiation that the Ukrainian public did not understand the drastic implications for their health.

The Klitschko family home in south Kiev was barely 60 miles away yet we see Wladimir, then 10, playing in pools of contaminated water.

Their father Vladimir, an air force colonel, was ordered to Chernobyl to help fight the leak on a daily basis. Vitali recalls: ‘We used to see him go out each morning and return each night exhausted.’

As the extent of the tragedy dawned, the boys were sent to camp thousands of miles from the capital.While, mercifully, Wladimir, 35, and Vitali have suffered no ill-effects in the ensuing 25 years, the cancer contracted by their father urged their relocation to Germany, where the brothers credit ‘the advanced medical treatment here for saving his life’.

Their adoption as heroes in Germany has also powered their rise to fame. This will be the fourth of Wladimir’s defences of his IBF, WBO, IBO and Ring belts to draw more than 55,000 fans to a football stadium.

Yet he and his brother — despite keeping homes in Hamburg and California — are bound to their roots.

‘There is another story,’ says Vitali. ‘A sports coach came to our home and told my parents that in addition to my schooling I could become a fighter. Some people said that nobody from the quarter where we lived could hope to become world heavyweight champion. But I already had that dream.

‘I had been excited by watching on television as Mike Tyson became the youngest champion. I went to see Rocky in the cinema and was inspired to believe that anything was possible.

‘So it began. Then, as we saw that Wladimir was going to be as big as me, I took him to the gym. I suppose the rest is history ... except for what we can do to help the future of others.

‘Nelson Mandela said that sport can help change the world and we believe the same. That is why our foundation is working with UNICEF to open many sports and teaching schools all over the world, with many of them in Ukraine.

‘We were given a lot of help on the way up and now we give back to the next generations, to the future of our country.’

Meanwhile, Haye is knocking the digital heads off his make-believe opponents. Can the WBA champion do that for real to the man regarded as the world’s pre-eminent heavyweight?

Sent packing: Klitschko was knocked down, and eventually beaten, by Corrie Sanders in 2003

‘Wladimir is not only my brother but my closest and greatest friend,’ says Vitali. ‘I always want to watch his back and of course we are nervous at each other’s fights. It is harder to watch than box. Then I am asked which of us is the best heavyweight in the world and I relax a little.

‘I remember what Haye must now answer. Who is physically the biggest and strongest; who has the most powerful punch; who has the most experience, especially at heavyweight; who has the best boxing skills; who is the most talented heavyweight in the world? It is Wladimir. No question.

‘If my brother is better than me, which he is, then he is better than Mr Haye.’

That calls into question, also, Haye’s belief that he has talked the weaker of the brothers into the opposite corner at the splendid Imtech Arena.

No holding back: David Haye has courted controversy with his iPhone game

Another vividly arresting image in Klitschko — a riveting production which opened to rave reviews at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival and will be coming soon to a cinema near you — is Vitali’s huge, screen-filling face with blood streaming from flesh around his eyes which is cut to the bone.

Those horrific wounds were inflicted by two slashing right hooks from Lennox Lewis, Haye’s predecessor as a British world heavyweight champion.

Klitschko was ahead on points when that title fight was stopped in the sixth round and the failure of Lewis to go through with a re-match before he retired clearly irks Vitali more than Haye’s crass antics now.

‘I am still upset with Lennox,’ he says. ‘I like him very much, I respect him as a boxer and a man. I was grateful that he gave me my chance to prove to the world that I could out-fight a great world champion.

‘But when we were still in the ring that night he promised to fight me again. I remain disappointed that he did not keep his word.’

Bloodied: Vitali Klitschko after he was stopped by British heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis

The consolation for Vitali was that the Lewis fight established him in the eyes of the world as a future great whose many qualities include a chin as resilient as Muhammad Ali’s.

That is one department in which he ranks beyond dispute as superior to his brother.

Wladimir has been knocked out three times, although not in the past seven years. So it is not Haye’s renowned speed which is a concern — ‘Wladimir has the fastest heavyweight jab in the world and has stopped some of the quickest men in the division’ — it is the difficulty of making an exact prediction when the big men collide.

In common with his brother, Vitali is a chess fanatic. He says: ‘In chess, nobody is an expert but everybody plays. In boxing, everybody is an expert but nobody fights.’

So in his expert opinion ‘Wladimir clearly has everything needed to win but when heavyweights fight not even a genius can be certain because one punch can change the world’.

If not, if our Goliath-baiting David fails to land his Hayemaker on the most notoriously difficult target to hit in any boxing ring today, the wider problem for the Klitschkos will be that of running out of opponents.

A promoter’s dream would be to set brother against brother for the undisputed world title.

‘That will never happen,’ says Vitali. ‘We promised our mother we will never fight each other.’

And being true to their word is cemented deep in the education which has been the making of these men.